A young man turns from drug addiction and petty crime to a life redeemed by a discovery of compassion.
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Reviews
If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Being a huge fan of Denis Johnson and Lou Reed, I was curious how they could make a movie from such unusually random events. The movie does such a great job stitching together Johnson's stories. They are extraordinary, humorous, and often touching. Together they make, in my opinion, one of the best 'drug' related movies ever. It is Borroughsesque in its candid, accurate portrayal of heroin addiction. The flashbacks and fuzzy pieced together vignettes resemble the actual effect heroin has on time. Time seems to slow down with days starting to blur into nights. The movie really touched me as I saw some of FH in myself. I too am a recovering addict. I have been clean for over a year now. Thank god for suboxone!!! For anyone grappling with heroin addiction please consider suboxone therapy. It has truly saved my life, marriage, and sanity.
it's not perfect but this is the sort of movie i love and wish could be made set in contemporary times. it mirrors, ever so lovingly, the spirit of the great 70's American cinema, the time period it is set in.there are a couple of unforgivable psychedelic freak outs but i suspect she had to throw those in to get distribution - because at it's sweet and wiggly core - this is a film that is deeply philosophical while being hilarious and transporting and challenging - everything the 70's outsider cinema was supposed to be about - nevermind the time it is set in.it is random partially because it is based on a book of short stories occupied by a character who is ever present in this film. billy cruddup aces it and is so gracefully in tune to the humor and zen of the movie that i will love him as an actor forever no matter what he does."no more pretending for him. he was completely and openly a mess. meanwhile, the rest of us go on pretending to each other. " "all these weirdos and me...getting a little better everyday in the middle of 'em.i had never known...i never imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us."
There was only one other review of this film when I wrote this and it deserved more than that, so here I am. I'll refer you to that review for much more detail, but I wanted to second the motion that this film deserves wider recognition. It's a bit "arty" but in an unpretentious kind of way, with some good laughs as well as some deep ideas. It's also not a bad film to watch with your teenagers (if they'll do something like that!) as a surreptitious way to get them to "just say no" to drugs. It paints what looks like a realistic portrait of life on drugs.I wanted to stop here, but IMDb is telling me I need 10 lines before they'll accept a review, which I hope they'll change. So what to add? Great acting and some great one-liners.
We are treated to the world as seen from the perspective of a young druggie (Billy Crudup) who repeatedly screws up through his mixture of bungling, passivity, and choice of companions. I frequently found my interest in the narrative and the characters waning, with particular memorable scenes that made it worthwhile to keep a watch. The uniqueness of the main character's perspective is presented in scenes with a mixture of surrealism at times (along with his own narrative that he can't quite remember). This could have made for an interesting production, but at times I just found it irritating. Maybe I've just seen too many loser druggie films and the mostly pointless lives they portray to empathize with these people and their situations, in contrast to the real-life addicts I have known. The film does have its own redemptive conclusion, however, and deserves credit for being more realistic in the way it is presented than we might have anticipated. In fact, the film's clever title may just have a double meaning, with reference to the Velvet Underground song "Heroin" and a semi-spiritual theme all in one; we're all God's children. Just having seen Crudup in Almost Famous, a film made around the same time from a similar period, may have typed him for me in this kind of role, although he was a far more "succesful" character in that far better film.